The Strange Sage

#ru #sage #confucianism #hanzi #chineselanguage

Have you ever considered how strange the character for (Confucian) Sage ? Scholar is ?

Here's the modern Form

So terribly masculine Man Radical 9 plus the Weather / Rain radical over R. 126 jokingly known as the beard but functioning as a connective usually combined with other words.

Now the right hand elements of this character is the word XU in modern Pinyin which has several meanings.

Lets look at a couple of older forms ...

and a closeup of that bottom right element  ER 

People say this represents a bearded chin but I keep thinking of water flowing from a spring . Why?

Now bear in mind this is a very OLD word and its meaning could have changed over the centuries.

Lets look at the elements as ideograms rather than phonetics.

Man / person plus weather / rain plus connective/ causal conjunction

Person  needs / instructs / relationship of weather ?

Some kind of priest or weather watcher or a scribe responsible for recording and watching the weather to predict drought flood cycles? 

Remember Chinese has one of the worlds oldest writing systems.